Kevin McKernan
speaker
709 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Dec
Kevin McKernan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yes. As Neanderthal came out and the Denisovans played a role in some of this. So they're still piecing some of that structure together with paleogenomics. So there's a whole field where you can go back and sequence things that are old. Like I was involved in one sequencing Utsi, the mummy, which they found frozen in ice that was probably 5,000 years old up in the Alps. Oh, really?
Just to understand what were the genetics like back then. I think they, interestingly enough, found Lyme disease in that guy. Really? That's something that shocked everyone because everyone believed that was a new world. And this guy was from 3000 BC?
Something like that, yeah. It's about 5,000 years ago. Yeah, that sounds about right. There's another, Pablo, what's Pablo's last name? There's a really good paleogenomicist I'm forgetting, but he actually, I think he maybe even got a Nobel Prize, so I should know this. It'll come up. But he has done a lot of work in developing the methods that make it possible to sequence DNA that's that old.
Because when DNA gets that old, it tends to break down in a particular manner, in a predictable manner. And you have to be aware of that in order to sequence it. And he's been very good at getting like woolly mammoth to sequence in a variety of old things. So you can begin to put that back together. Svante Pabo. There he is. Yes. I forgot his first name.
um so yeah he's a real pioneer in being able to do this uh this type of work but um that helps um bring the picture back but you're right we are a a diaspora that came through a bottleneck and um which is one reason why many people on the genome project were um i think there's a strong message in here that that this this idea of um race differences is actually irrelevant when you look at the genomes right do we have any idea when that bottleneck occurred
I think there is – probably 100,000 years ago was when the diaspora was most extreme. Although you can find obviously hominids back a million years. They go as far back as Australopithecus. We haven't gotten sequence from material that's that old. I think some of the records and sequencing are probably – 50 or 100,000 years. I haven't kept directly up to speed with it.
Svante probably has the record on the oldest thing ever sequenced. But that's – yeah, I haven't kept up with the human population genomics story there because in some ways it's very boring. Yeah. It's, as you said, there's not a lot to it. We all came from a fairly recent ancestor.
And it's, you know, you can't find some interesting things about the genetics that change with lactose tolerance based on when we think we went through, you know, when we began to get involved in agriculture and a more, you know, farm-based lifestyle. So there are some, you know, genetics that
No, I mean, the thing that's really unique about humans is that we're very adaptable and we can move. And as a result, I think, you'll find that our genomes aren't nearly as complex as plants. Plants are sessile, so they're stuck. When the environment changes, they can't run away from it. They have to carry a lot more genomic tricks in their bag to compensate for it.
So, in fact, there's a very good and interesting piece of work I'd forward you to from David Sinclair, who works on a lot of this longevity stuff. Yeah. He was digging around in the xenohormesis field, which I think is fascinating. It's kind of an intersection of cannabis and human genetics.
Plants, as we became agriculturally centered as a society, and this has probably happened long before that occurred, but plants have this capacity of making secondary metabolites that signal to the organisms that eat them and spread their seed around They give information about the environment.
So a lot of the secondary metabolites that you'll find in plants when they're stressed will signal to the organism that consumes them to prepare with caloric restriction. So you'll see many of the compounds that hit the rapamycin pathway and the mTOR pathway are polyphenols and flavonoids and things plants create when they're stressed out. Whoa.
So this is one of these, this is something we pay attention to in the cannabis field, because if you want to get very diverse chemotypes of plants, you can't grow them in perfectly happy environments. Like you actually want to stress them to some extent so that you get anthocyanins to come up. When you stress them, you tend to get different terpene profiles.
You tend to get cannabinoids are coming off that same pathway. And how would you stress them? Well, in some ways, you never let them see pollen. That makes them stressful. Okay. So they end up growing really large flowers waiting for pollen. So the way to get the highest THC loads are to never let them see pollen, at least for the females. And you can also do it with light cycles.
You can do it with temperature and pH and other types of treatments in the soil that will – alter its actual secondary metabolite profile, so you get a different chemotype for the plant. That might be important in the way people are making oils for cancer.
Cancer is oftentimes a scenario where you need to grab onto the mTOR pathway or the rapamycin pathway and just change the metabolism of the organism, and you need to feed them with these extracts that are from plants that are stressed. Yeah, it's a wild world. It is wild.
Oh, interesting.
Oh, really?
Anyways, count on the CIA to torture things, right?
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